I became a Sherlock Holmes fan at the end of primary school with the passion that tween kids can develop at that age. I couldn’t get enough and it was the best ever. But even then The Hound of the Baskervilles was not my favorite, because Sherlock Holmes wasn’t very present in the story and there was an element of fantastic that went against the logic and scientific demonstrations that fascinated me.
I have read several books by Pierre Bayard, and each of them elicits the same reaction from me: eye roll, exasperation at his know-it-all attitude, then he wins me over: once I’m game, it’s a lot of fun. You need to be in a special mindset to accept the possibility that characters have their own lives, separate from authors’ intentions, and that authors might have been wrong in solving a whodunit mystery. So far I’ve failed to convince Mr. Smithereens to give it a chance because for him to imagine an alternate version of a novel is way weirder than an alternate version of history (and a waste of time)
I started the book with a hefty dose of suspicion. Pierre Bayard had fooled me to find another culprit in And there were none, but he could not do his magic trick on me with Sherlock Holmes, I knew the Canon too well, I would see it through. Verdict? He did it again. His solution makes a lot more sense than Conan Doyle’s and his reasoning why Conan Doyle gave a wrong solution is convincing enough, at least for people with Freudian interests.
If you haven’t read The Hound of the Baskervilles and Sherlock Holmes, this book is not for you. The target readership is a Sherlock Holmes fan who has taken some distance with the Canon, and is ok for a clever play. Who else is game?
Smithereens 